One of the trickiest things about developing smart higher education policy is that its clients are unbelievably diverse: privileged private-school educated 18 year-olds, first-generation students, working adults, etc.  And the returns to education are equally diverse: strong for Bachelors’ and Master’s Degrees but less so for Doctorates, often strong in professionally-oriented fields and less so in Arts (at least in the first few years).  Coming up with reasonable pricing and student aid policies that can be generally accepted as fair across in the face of all this diversity is a very tricky job indeed.

The first part of this was brought home to me recently when we saw the results of some research  conducted by British Columbia on mature students across Canada.  One of the questions asked was “what’s the biggest sacrifice you have had to make to go back to school”?  The sheer range of answers we got was astonishing.  At one end, there were answers like “I had to give up my gym/yoga membership”, or “I had to give up quinoa” (a high proportion of these, it should be said, came from British Columbia).  The most common response was that people’s social lives were negatively affected because they could no longer afford to eat out with friends.

But at the other end of the spectrum there were some pretty horrific responses.  People who had to pull their kids out of sports teams.  People choosing between rent and food, or rent and medicine.  People who had had spells of homelessness.   All told, the results showed that the several thousand student-aid receiving mature students surveyed, just short of ten percent had experienced a significant form of food or housing precariousness while being a student.

Simply put, there are students who really have very little need of extra help, and there are students who need a lot more help than they currently receive.  This is precisely why the kind of system towards which Canada’s student aid programs are evolving is a good thing: we are withdrawing support from better-off students and concentrating it among worse-off students.  Could we do better?   Sure.  In particular we could do more for the people I call “involuntary students” – people in their 30s or 40s who have cars and houses but who suddenly lose their job and need to re-train.  But the point is, we need more targeted aid, not less.  One-size fits all policies are unhelpful.

It is the same with respect to returns to education.  It is a simple slogan to say that education must be free, that education must not be commoditized.  But it is also a simplistic one.  Low prices (net or sticker) can make a difference in terms of attracting low-income students.  But they also provide huge windfall benefits to students in fields with above-average returns, and it’s really hard to argue that there is any kind of public policy rationale for pricing a public service in such a way that some students (say, in ECE programs) see a very low private return and other students (say, in Dentistry programs) see a very high private return.  There is a way to square this circle: it’s to charge different amounts based on the field of study, and deal with the negative effects of higher fees through income-targeted grants.  Although not all of Canada looks like this, it is more or less the way the system currently works in Ontario. 

The point here is simply this: higher education is not a simple field.  It has many purposes, many clients, many outcomes.  To make it work properly, the policies and regulations which govern it need to be sensitive to this diversity.  Any higher education policy which you can put on a button or a bumper-sticker is therefore likely to be either wrong or wasteful.